When Brant Houston moved to the Champaign-Urbana Illinois area from Columbia Missouri to assume the University of Illinois’s Knight Chair in Journalism he did what he had long encouraged students to do in the classes he taught on computer assisted reporting: he trawled through census data to get a sense of his community. The poverty rate immediately stuck out as far out of proportion to its presence in local news; in Houston’s view it appeared to be one of the defining characteristics of the community but he suspected that residents without direct experience of it particularly in the university community likely did not know much about the poor in their midst. He decided to do some reporting.